Marble 0.10 was released on August 10th, 2010. It is part of the KDE 4.5 Software Compilation. In the good tradition of recent years, we have collected those changes directly visible to the user. Unfortunately we were a bit late with our visual changelog for the release. So please enjoy looking over the new and noteworthy:

Last weekend I received a postal package that contained a classroom atlas from Austria: the Neuer Kozenn Atlas. Inside there was a nice shiny CD with the title GEOTHEK Schulatlas, Version 1.1 Digitaler Weltatlas. The publisher of this atlas and its software is Ed. Hölzel.

In a few hours KDE 4.5 will be released. And together with it the new version of our Virtual Globe and Map Widget Marble. The new release Marble 0.10.0 will bring lots of additional features (Routing, Tile-Bulk-Download, Multiple Layers, initial WMS support and a lot more) - many of them related to OpenStreetMap.

The student application deadline for Google Summer of Code 2010 is near: So if you plan to submit an application for a Marble project then it needs to arrive no later than April 9, 19:00 UTC.
I have just added a few more ideas to the idea page: OpenDesktop.org support and Panorama support. So now in total there are five Marble ideas listed on our idea page:

KDE 4.2 is in bug fixing mode and so is Marble. Time to have a look at things that got implemented right in time for Marble 0.7: Henry de Valence has been one of the most active Marble core developers during the last few months: He has implemented several exciting Marble features already.

For Marble 0.7 (KDE 4.2) he implemented MarbleRunners. This is a pretty nice feature, which is still a bit hidden, but that is probably going to change soon:

Make sure you have internet -- Oh, ok, yes, I just wanted to make sure ...

Start Marble (e.g. from KDE 4.2 Beta1 or trunk)

Find the "Search" field and type in: Playmobil

Wait for the results to arrive!

What happens is that on pressing the Enter key Marble will send the search query to several "service" threads in the background called "MarbleRunners". These threads will return the result as soon as it is available. In this case the OpenStreetMap-Runner has returned four matching results from the OpenStreetMap-Server!

Ok, let's try another one: Imagine, you are somewhere in Finland on holidays ("Tervetuloa!"), it snows and you feel really hungry. In this situation Marble can be a true life-saver ("Hyvää ruokahalua!"):

The source code for the OpenStreetMap-Runner is based on source code by Jens-Michael Hoffmann who also created the OpenStreetMap integration for Marble. Henry de Valence has taken it and created a Marble runner out of it. Additionally Henry has created a Coordinate-Runner:

Enter e.g.
46°14'00" N 06°03'00" E

or just:

46 14 00 N 06 03 00 E

and press the Enter key. The latter will almost immediately return a result from the GeoCoordinate-Runner and several results from the OpenStreetMap-Runner trailing in a few seconds afterwards:

The best thing is however that Henry has made a HOWTO for creating MarbleRunners. So now you can create your own MarbleRunner yourself! The example shows how easy it is! And the description ensures that you can do this even if you are a beginner.

Just go here to get the HOWTO and just look here to get instructions on how to compile Marble.

The best Runners that you'll come up with will get shipped with the next version of Marble (your chance to enter history)!

I could imagine lots of runners: What e.g. about a Wikipedia-Runner (we don't have that one yet, ...)? What ideas do you have? Please let us know or even better: send us your patch! We are reachable via marble-devel@kde.org. Or join us on IRC ( #kde-edu, Freenode: irc.kde.org )! Of course we also appreciate all kinds of patches that improve the current MarbleRunners as well!

Shortly after the Marble OpenStreetMap integration I'm happy to report that Simon Schmeisser has managed to integrate Marble as a Flake Shape into KPresenter. As a flake shape you can change the map according to your liking even after it has been embedded into the KOffice application. So it's not just a simple image but rather a component that allows the user to adjust the content:

If you're a student and if you're still searching for a suitable GSoC 2008 idea then Marble might offer a chance to participate in a young, vivid and interesting project. We suggest that you have a look at the Google Summer of Code Ideas page. There are especially three ideas which seem to be exciting and very important:

Poll

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